Exploring the impact of employee turnover on the effectiveness of software development team archetypes

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an agent-based simulation study that explores the effects of team behavior on the efficiency and effectiveness of software development organizations that pursue incremental and iterative processes. The conceptual model underlying the simulation framework is based on the fundamental tenets of organization theory. The organization-theoretic perspective to simulation modeling of software processes entails characterizing the components of organizational design, as well as types of team cooperation mechanisms that are associated with selected team archetypes. We present the simulation framework Team-RUP and use it to examine the extent of the impact of turbulence (i.e., employee turnover) on the effectiveness of software development under various team archetypes. We observe that asynchronous team cooperation models are less predictable than synchronous models. Also, teams that utilize bottom-up coordination strategies are more adept at responding to change.

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
agent-based simulation, rational unified process, software process simulation, team behavior